I humbly apologize for the verbosity of the previous post. Here’s what you’re really after: a photo of Nora contemplating whether a second referendum on the Lisbon treaty is really inevitable at this point.

I wandered away from the computer earlier and, while I was gone, Nora took the opportunity to send my good friend Markus Nee her first ever Instant Message. I asked her if I could reproduce it here and she smiled and bounced up and down; I must assume this was assent.

]=l.l[i.

I’ll note only a few things about her precocious mastery of the medium:

already she is using emoticons: ]= but I wonder what she’s sad about.

the second emoticon is somewhat more cheery: |.| I believe this is a person cheering (arms held triumphantly above the head).

leaving the cryptic: [i. She is somehow setting herself apart from these two previous emoticons; indicating, perhaps, that she is neither sad nor jubilant but instead exists in an offset, declarative space. suggesting a zen like calm belied by the singing and arm swinging with which this brief missive was typed.

she has chosen to eschew upper case, even in the first person singular pronoun. A common enough decision for instant messaging, but still a striking choice for a pre-toddler.

I can only assume that she was trying to communicate to Markus that her parents have been a mixture of glum and jubilant of late. Depressed that the summer is ending and the normal grind of the school year returns but invigorated by the perennial opportunity for personal growth, meeting new students, exploring new ideas, helping to shape young minds. Meanwhile she remains aloof — undisturbed by such parental vicissitudes. Mommy and Daddy may be frantically preparing her world for the coming semester, but the bean just is.

She is, as ever, truly insightful. Also? teeth 7 and 8 are in. She might be chatting about that. One hopes Squires will offer an interpretation.

This past weekend we all went to my mom’s house to mark (rather early) Uncle Brian’s 29th birthday (that number is hexadecimal; 101001 in binary; you’re on your own for the decimal). Here, at long last, is a decent picture of Uncle Jim and Nora.

Nora played hard and ate well (consuming both food-type ingestibles and, as seen here, ribbon):

And, on the way home, belle passed out asleep without letting go of the ball:

I turned around while washing the dishes and found the laundry basket moving across the floor like something out of a Scooby Doo cartoon. She was pretty darned proud when she managed to free herself, though:

The only way a gate would fit at the bottom of our staircase was just above the first step so, naturally, Nora spends most of her time on the first step, hanging from the gate by one hand, and making monkey noises (okay, I’m exaggerating the monkey noises).

When not swinging from the gate, though, she likes to relax by climbing upside down into a cardboard box on the floor.

I’m just sick that we didn’t get a picture of this, but Nora has taken a definite stand on pickles. During a snack of Cheerios while her mom and I ate dinner, I thought I’d offer Nora a small piece of my pickle. She took it in her mouth, made a face that screamed “this is awful!”, and spat it out. She’d never spat anything out before and I think she was mildly confused by the way her normally loving and supportive parents were hurting themselves laughing at her misfortune.

She refused the next two Cheerios as well until we gave her some water to cleanse her palate & wash the despised taste of pickle away.

This morning Nora’s ego is writing checks her body can’t quite cash. Here we see our silly goose dropping Jacques between her feet while standing at the coffee table. We’d gotten the camera out in hopes of capturing her new habit of letting go with one or, less successfully, both(!!) hands from whatever she’s pulled herself up on.

Instead we got this. She took one hand off the table, stepped on the dropped peacock, he zipped away beneath the table, and she surfed him all the way to the floor. Amazingly, she managed to hold on with the other hand and accomplished a very convincing-looking spin, ending up happily and safely resting on her bum. This lucky photo is about seven eighths of the way through the maneuver.